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Krueger to receive IZA Prize in Labor Economics

Posted October 31, 2006; 03:00 p.m.

by Eric Quiñones

Princeton economist Alan Krueger has been named a winner of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in recognition of his influential research on education and labor-market issues.

Krueger will share the award with David Card, a University of California-Berkeley economist and frequent collaborator who served on the Princeton faculty from 1983 to 1997.

The prize, which is worth 50,000 euros (approximately $64,000), honors research that addresses important public policy concerns. It is awarded annually by Germany's Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), with support from the Deutsche Post Foundation. Krueger and Card will receive the prize at a Nov. 8 ceremony in Berlin.

"David Card and Alan Krueger have stimulated labor economics for many years with their original research approach, the practical relevance of their results and their remarkable use of natural experiments to test commonly accepted models," said IZA Director Klaus Zimmermann.

Krueger and Card were cited for their analysis of the impact of education, training and human capital on earnings, such as research demonstrating that the quality of schooling has an enormous influence on future income.

They also have made pathbreaking contributions to the analysis of the minimum wage, showing that moderate increases do not have the destructive impact on employment that many critics fear. They received international attention for their 1994 study comparing fast-food employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before and after the New Jersey minimum wage increase.

Krueger's work also has included research on the controversial New York City school voucher experiment, in which he found that giving students vouchers to attend private school did not improve their performance on standardized tests.

Krueger, the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy, has been a Princeton faculty member since 1987. He is the founding director of the University's Survey Research Center and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the Institute for the Study of Labor.